Eben Moglen, law professor and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center, gave a talk on privacy that discussed exactly this. I believe it was in 2011.
I would urge you also to consider that privacy is an ecological rather
than a transactional substance. This is a crucial distinction from what
you are taught to believe by the people whose job it is to earn off you.
Those who wish to earn off you want to define privacy as a thing you
transact about with them, just the two of you. They offer you free email
service, in response to which you let them read all the mail, and that’s
that. It’s just a transaction between two parties. They offer you free
web hosting for your social communications, in return for watching
everybody look at everything. They assert that’s a transaction in which
only the parties themselves are engaged.
This is a convenient fraudulence. Another misdirection, misleading, and
plain lying proposition. Because - as I suggested in the analytic
definition of the components of privacy - privacy is always a relation
among people. It is not transactional, an agreement between a listener
or a spy or a peephole keeper and the person being spied on.
If you accept this supposedly bilateral offer, to provide email service
for you for free as long as it can all be read, then everybody who
corresponds with you has been subjected to the bargain, which was
supposedly bilateral in nature.
(Full transcript available at [0], video at [1].)
Interestingly I see I'm not the first to quote this at length on HackerNews [2].
(Link-rot has eaten the original [0] URL, and archive.org is seemingly down, but I realise the irony in linking to Google's cached page, as well as their copy of the video.)
Interestingly I see I'm not the first to quote this at length on HackerNews [2].
[0] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qflooj...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRs8ZPbHtos
[2] https://hackertimes.com/item?id=6747916
(Link-rot has eaten the original [0] URL, and archive.org is seemingly down, but I realise the irony in linking to Google's cached page, as well as their copy of the video.)